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A friend gave me his CD which had broken into two pieces and asked if I could fix it.

Looking at it I knew there was no way I could recover all the files correctly, but there was a possibility that some files could be recovered. So I took up the challenge.

The first thing that I wanted to do was to attach the CD using Pidilite’s FeviQuick but I didn’t have any so I used FeviCol instead to attach the two pieces together.

There were way too many scratches and the portion near the crack had vanished so I wasn’t too optimistic about the result. But I had way too much time on my hands so I thought I’d go all the way just to see what happens.

After an hour or two, the glue had hardened but the CD would still bend when lifted. I then used cellotape to ensure that the CD remained in one piece.

After the cellotape fix, I realized that I had spilt some of the Fevicol on the CD layer.

I used a combination of cologne and my mom’s nail polish remover to remove the glue and it even managed to remove a few scratches.

That’s it. The CD was firm, relatively clean and seemed ready for the Acid Test so I inserted it in my laptop’s CD drive.

Obviously with the amount of damage the disc had taken there was no way Windows would even detect it as a CD.

I used some of the free tools from here and I managed to recover a few text files, pictures and portions of a video.

You’ll probably have more luck with your recovery process if your CDs are in better condition. 😉